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Guest editor's preface.

Article Excerpt
The days are happily long gone when science fiction (SF) novels had to be published with an apologetic reference on their covers to 'what is unhappily known as "science fiction"', as was the case with the 1950s Penguin editions of John Wyndham's works. (1) Now no justification is needed; Wyndham's novels are currently appearing in the Penguin Modern Classics series. More is involved in this development than the canonization of an important author. Over recent decades SF has moved from the margins of our culture to a position of centrality. The American novelist Thomas M. Disch has argued that SF's 'basic repertory of images--rocket ships and robots, aliens and dinosaurs--are standard items in the fantasy life of any preschooler' and that SF 'has come to permeate our culture in ways both trivial and/or profound, obvious and/or insidious'. (2) Ronald Reagan's promotion of the Star Wars defence system was an obvious example, but only one of many.

The notion of the alien--the theme of this collection--is as old as the SF genre itself. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay shows in the lead essay, the alien is an extension or shadow of the human, an image of difference that is often introduced into narratives to speculate on the nature and limits of the human. Again and again SF narratives shade into the horror genre. H. G. Wells's exploration of vivisection, The Island of Doctor Moreau, was originally planned as a gothic novel and then reshaped into an early example of what was to become a stock SF theme: the experiment that goes wrong. The proximity between SF and horror has led the novelist Brian Aldiss to argue that the two genres have evolved in tandem, emerging in one seminal...

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